


Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France...

by Mithrigil



Category: Inglourious Basterds (2009), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Tarantino Pastiche, War Stories, one thing and one thing only, please stop touching people Standartenführer they don't like it when you touch them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-15
Updated: 2011-06-15
Packaged: 2017-10-20 10:33:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithrigil/pseuds/Mithrigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sixteen-year-old Erik Lehnsherr is waiting for the Basterds at <i>La Louisiane</i> instead of Bridget von Hammersmark. This, well, might change a few things about how the war ends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France...

**June, 1944**

“You didn’t say the goddamn rendezvous was in a fucking basement.”

Archie Hicox adjusts his collar. It’s tight. You would think one of the Basterds could sew this down to a more precise cut but apparently the stereotype of the Jewish tailor doesn’t extend to the American OSS. As it stands, it’s the best fit of the uniforms available. Perhaps Hicox’s cover identity has gained some weight in addition to his rank.

“I didn’t know,” he says.

Lieutenant Raine, that embodiment of all colonial crassness, is predictably unimpressed. “You said it was in a tavern.”

“It _is_ a tavern.”

“Yeah. In a basement. You know, fighting in a basement offers a lot of difficulties, number one being you’re _fighting in a basement._ ”

Wicki speaks up, looking a rather different sort of uncomfortable in his SS uniform. “What if the kid doesn’t show?”

Hicox shakes his head. “Then we wait.”

“He’s a kid?” Raine asks.

“He’s a spy,” Hicox corrects. “And he’ll make the rendezvous.”

“He’s a kid,” Raine repeats, and scrapes his knuckles against the windowpane. “That explains why he thinks it’s a bright idea to hold the meeting in a goddamn basement.”

***

The Wehrmacht soldiers are playing what looks to be a rousing game of Twenty Questions: as the cards would have it, Pola Negri, Mata Hari, Tsar Nicholas, Lillian Harvey, and Hector Berlioz are assembled around the table. Whoever brought Hector Berlioz isn’t being terribly sporting, never mind that the Nazis aren’t supposed to be here at all. But there’s no backing out now, so Hicox leads Stiglitz and Wicki down the stairs all as planned, and they gather at the table in the corner.

The bartender greets them and takes their orders: the agreed-upon signal is for Hicox to order his drink with a long spoon. He asks for a Manhattan—it’s probably far too memorable a drink, but Hicox can’t stand martinis—and the bartender laughs at him, and calls over to the barback that they’re going to need more ice.

Erik Lehnsherr looks Archie Hicox square in the eyes, then leans his mop and bucket against the wall.

It is a long, tense while before anyone at the Basterds’ table gets a drink. The Wehrmacht soldier with Berlioz’s card stuck to his forehead mistakes himself for Bizet, which isn’t so awful, and play passes to Pola Negri, then Mata Hari, and finally Tsar Nicholas, who figures out who he is after a few more gulps of beer. Erik brings the bartender his ice, and hands down the bitters when asked. Conveniently for Hicox, Berlioz over there figures himself out and calls for another round of drinks, so the bartender sends Erik over instead. As he places the Manhattan in front of Hicox, the spoon shivers against the rim of the glass.

“You didn’t say there would be German soldiers here,” Hicox says under his breath.

“You didn’t say you would be dressed like them,” Erik returns, about as sour as this drink is apt to be. “I think we’re even.” He puts Wicki and Stiglitz’s drinks down as well, bowing his head to hide that he’s speaking. “Are your friends upstairs?”

“Yes.”

“American?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll go talk to them instead. Join us when you’re done. And don’t go into the back room.”

“Why not?”

“Because I killed a Major back there and I don’t want you to pretend to launch an investigation.” Erik says it calmly enough that Hicox, if he had an article to write about it, would describe him as a cold-blooded villain.

“Good thing he’s on our side,” Wicki says, once Erik is all but gone, tapping out a cigarette on his way up the stairs.

Hicox drinks his Manhattan and can’t help but agree.

***

“Kid looks like you,” Raine says. “Or he’s gonna when he gets older.”

“Coincidence,” Hicox says. He hadn’t realized.

***

“So it goes like this,” Raine starts, with his figurative lines drawn in equally figurative sand. “Erik here tells me all them Nazis are prettied up for a little dinner-theayter, but they ain’t going to any Ritz. Little hole of a place, seats three-fifty, ma and pa and their little blond number kind of establishment. On the one hand, that makes our job a little easier, don’t it. On the other, that just made the invite list about as exclusive as a party at Saint Peter’s.”

“And there were only twelve spots on his guest list reserved for Jews,” Donowitz supplies, not all that helpfully, but at least he and the privates seem to find it amusing.

“So that leaves us out here with a shit-ton of tri-nitro-toluene,” Raine says, “and a mission that we’re gonna have to abort.”

“You can leave locking the doors to me,” Erik says. “I can’t get you in to the premiere, but I can make sure that no one else ever gets out.”

“I can get us in,” Hicox says.

“Then you’ll never get out.”

Hicox shrugs. “Well it wouldn’t be the first time a critic died at the theater.”

***

“You’re a film critic,” Erik says, in his steady, accented English.

“You’re hovering in my doorway,” Hicox says, since that’s just as obvious. He puts down his newspaper. “Come in.”

Erik obeys, and turns to shut the door behind him. Now that Hicox is actually _looking_ for the resemblance, he can see it: the boy’s face is thinner, of course, and his skin sallower, but his nose is the same shape Hicox’s was before he took a cricket-bat to the nose at University, and his eyes are the same clearwater blue. But Erik is lean all through, teenaged attenuation and that long unbroken German line from his chin to his ankles. Hicox thinks if the boy tried to hold up his trousers with braces, they’d slide clean off.

“You’re a film-critic,” Erik repeats.

“Yes, and you aren’t hovering in my doorway anymore,” Hicox says. “I’m a film-critic.”

“And a soldier.”

“Well, there’s little point in criticizing a film during wartime. It gums up the presses on the home front, and doesn’t make your enemies any less likely to shoot you.” Hicox smiles. “I was sent here because I have enough knowledge of German culture and the German language to pass among you. That’s all.”

Erik shakes his head, but doesn’t hang it. “Why do you like German movies?”

“Because no matter how broad the strokes are, they don’t cover up the cracks in the canvas.”

“I’m not familiar with that expression,” Erik says, and the way he admits that he doesn’t know something is much less shameful than it would be for a British boy his age. Hicox marks it.

He translates, _“In groben Zügen.”_

“Oh,” Erik says, and switches to German. “So you like German films because even when they say something coarsely, or something you can’t argue with, they’re still somehow subtle.”

“It’s not the films that are subtle,” Hicox says. “It’s the way they expose what it means to be German, when they were made. How old are you, Erik?”

“Sixteen.”

“So you probably haven’t seen many films from the twenties,” Hicox says.

“I haven’t seen many films at all.”

“You are German, yes?”

“Yes. And Jewish.”

Hicox counts backward in his head, and comes to a rather fraught conclusion. “Ah. Yes. My apologies. But you have seen _some_ films, at least.”

Going by the way Erik glowers at him, that wasn’t the best intimation.

“Well,” Hicox starts again, with the intent to salvage as much as he can, “in the rest of the world, the Jews control how films are made. So there’s something to be said for that.”

“But are those films also drawn with coarse lines?”

“Some are, some aren’t,” Hicox says.

“And do they reveal what it means to be German?”

“They reveal what it means to be Ernst Lubitsch.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He was a German Jew. Now he’s an American.”

“Then how much can his films reveal what it means to be German?”

“You read between the lines,” Hicox explains. “The way you do with a book or a fairy-tale. Snow White—you know Snow White?—if someone asked you about Snow White, what would you say the story was about? And please, come in, and sit down.”

Erik does as Hicox says, but his hand lingers on the doorknob, and then settles awkwardly on his knee. “Snow White,” he says quietly, on the heels of a deep breath.

“Snow White. If someone asked you.”

“I’d say it’s about a jealous queen, who saw in a magic mirror that her step-daughter was prettier than she. So the queen sends her daughter off to be killed, but the huntsman can’t do it, and Snow White grows up as the servant to a group of dwarves, and when the Queen finds out that Snow White is still alive, she reveals how ugly she really is, and—”

“That’s enough,” Hicox says. “But the way Walt Disney tells it in America, it is about how love makes you beautiful. And Alexander Pushkin tells it as a story of longing and chivalry. And when I tell it, or when I talk about it at least, it’s about an old person who can’t get over the possibility that her younger counterpart might be better. And you?”

Erik shuts his eyes. “To me it is about ugliness, and how it does not always show.”

“Exactly.” Hicox’s newspaper is still on the bed between them, so Hicox moves it aside and scoots closer. “So if you were the director, or the screenwriter, or the actor playing her Prince Charming, it would still be about that jealous queen, but I could see you through the cracks, and know at least a little of what you think the story is about. That’s what I mean, about German cinema. There are bold morals, and simple stories, and fairy-tales and, yes, propaganda. But even with all of that—”

“What we are as a people shines through,” Erik finishes. “What we are inside.”

“Exactly,” Hicox says. “And it’s a way for me to know your country, without being part of it.”

“And love it.”

“Well, yes, I suppose. Though you’re not making it easy, these last few years.”

Erik doesn’t laugh. Hicox supposes that’s all right. But he crumples the newspaper in his fist and slides it off the bed entirely. He hasn’t had a chance to talk about film at all, not since his briefing with Fenech, and it’s damned refreshing, even if his jokes don’t really translate.

“We are not an easy people to love,” Erik says, eyes level and hard.

“The Germans?” Hicox guesses. “The Jews?”

Erik doesn’t answer.

Well, that’s as good as saying both are true, so Hicox assumes. “No person is easy to love. No person, of any people. Love itself is difficult. Don’t confuse being difficult to love with being easy to hate.”

“So we’re easy to hate?”

Hicox smiles. “I’m a film critic. Everyone is easy to hate.”

***

For a man with TNT strapped to his ankles, Hicox thinks he is walking remarkably straight. His ticket proclaims him a composer—the next-most invisible asset to a film, after editors and critics, neither of whom would have been invited—and Erik escapes notice as his son. The cigarette girls eye Erik up and down as he passes by, and Hicox can’t blame them; White Tie doesn’t suit Erik at all, however closely tailored, but the boy doesn’t fidget or rub at his forearm, and overall he cleans up well. His cufflinks, though, those never seem to stay in place, and Hicox could swear that the bends of the little silver swastikas had faced the correct way when Erik put them on.

Either way, all of the attention is favorable thus far. Hicox accepts a flute of champagne and declines on Erik’s behalf when he is too busy staring at the girl’s prodigious cleavage—or, as it would appear, the lavaliere dangling so deep into it that Hicox can’t see its charms.

“So we’re in,” Erik says, in startlingly good French.

“Indeed,” Hicox says. “There’s always one more door.”

“No, there isn’t.” Erik doesn’t quite smile, but he leans up, as if to make what he says clear in spite of the gala around them. “You’re sure you’re willing to do this?”

Hicox laughs. “For one thing, it’s only fitting, and for another, it’s too late to back out now.”

“All right,” Erik says, or begins to say, at least; Hicox could not have staged this more perfectly if he were Busby Berkley himself, but an SS officer with more medals than Hicox can immediately count trips over the corner of a cigarette girl’s tray and splashes his champagne down the back of Erik’s jacket.

“My apologies, my apologies!” the officer says, in the sort of German that places him square in Bavaria or even further south, and he quickly hands off his now mostly-empty champagne flute to a passing waiter. Erik is in the process of shucking off his jacket, but the officer helps, and the way his hands linger on Erik’s shoulders isn’t lost to either of them. “There you go,” he says, and folds it over Erik’s arm. “You should take your wallet out, and your papers, I’m sure someone will clean this for you by the time you’re out of the premiere. Oh, I am so clumsy on occasion! You would never take me for a soldier.”

“It’s all right,” Hicox says, and in French, because damned if he doesn’t know a challenge when he sees one, and he can only hope that Erik doesn’t compromise it. “Soldiering takes all types.”

A moment of recognition washes over the officer’s face, and then just as fleeting a moment of smirking capitulation. “It does at that,” he says, in French now, and offers his hand. “Colonel Hans Landa of the SS.”

The name is far from lost on Hicox. He’s just glad to be the one to shake the Jew Hunter’s hand first so Erik doesn’t have to. “Henri Dutilleux,” Hicox introduces himself, “conductor of the choir of the National Opera.”

“And a composer!” Landa cheers, and squeezes Hicox’s hand so tight he can feel his blood surge. “A pity about your tenure in Rome. But you have at least come back to where you belong. Is this fine young man your student?”

“My son,” Hicox says, because the lie comes easily, “Edgar,” and all the medals on Landa’s lapel chatter and scrape as he shifts to take Erik’s hand instead.

“ _Edgar_ ,” Landa says, as exuberant and hopeful as a child. His fingertips slip under Erik’s cuff, and Erik shudders powerfully but doesn’t pull away. “So pleasant to meet you. Are you a fan of Herr Goebbels’ work? I hear this one is going to be a masterpiece of cinema.”

“I find his work difficult to enjoy,” Erik says. “But I can’t help but be curious.”

“Oh, then be curious, young man.” Landa’s smile sparkles like the silver and gold that adorns him. “This cannot go on the record, of course, but I find Herr Goebbels rather hit-or-miss myself. Sometimes he crafts a masterwork, to be sure, but sometimes his message can’t help but stand in the way of his art. You certainly understand, Monsieur Dutilleux. It’s such a tricky thing, to coax a work of art out of its struggle to uphold a statement, an ideology. Ah, but here I am, speaking like an artist! You must find it utterly _gauche._ ”

“I am sure you meant no offense,” Hicox lies.

“But of course. After all, we are all pretenders to our crafts in the end. I myself was once a baritone. Has your voice broken yet, my dear Edgar? Do you sing in your father’s choir?”

“Not since I was a treble,” Erik says. Hicox has to inwardly commend the boy for not betraying himself with more than a tightly closed fist—

—and, it seems, a broken cufflink. Hicox watches the little inverted swastika fall to the floor almost in slow-motion, just a tiny glimmer of light that rings out before Erik crushes under his heel.

And too late, at that.

“Oh dear,” Landa says, and gets to one knee. “Did I break that, Edgar? I really am the clumsiest thing. Let’s let your father take his seat in the theater, and we’ll go take care of this and your coat, shall we? Don’t worry, I don’t intend to miss the beginning either.” He clasps his hand behind Erik’s knee, and moves him, lifts his heel off the cufflink to retrieve it. “We’ll be right along, won’t we.”

Erik looks Hicox in the eyes, and nods, just once, slow and awful.

“Wonderful,” Landa says, and switches to German. Hicox can’t suppress the shudder. “Right this way, _Edgar,_ ” he says, straightening up and taking Erik by the forearm. “We won’t be a minute.”

Hicox watches them go, for as long as he can. But for now, at least, it is all according to plan, and Hicox takes his seat in the theater for what will be the last time either way.

 _Hell,_ he thinks, _at least it’s in a theater._

***

***

Hans Landa is bursting with glee. He only permits just enough of it to show, but surely the young man can feel some of it, in the tight clasp of Hans’ hand around his arm. Why, Hans is holding tight enough to feel the raised impression of six little numbers! That, of course, Hans will also wait to say.

“There is no sense in pretending any more,” he says instead, before the door to the office is even closed behind him. “After all, I’ve given you the courtesy of my real name and rank. You _are_ Erik Lehnsherr, yes?“

The door closes.

“Yes,” the boy says.

“Wonderful,” Hans says, and claps his hands together. He still has Erik’s jacket draped over his arm, so he turns and spreads it out on the desk, papers and wallet at all. “And with that out of the way, I have a few questions to ask.”

Erik stands with his arms limp at his side, and if Hans couldn’t smell the anger and the power threaded through him he would think he’d scared all the fight out of the boy. He’s thankful that it isn’t the case. This wouldn’t do at all, then.

“Were you until recently employed at a tavern called _La Louisiane_ , under the name Max Weber?”

“Yes.”

“Were you working there last night?”

“Yes.”

“Did you leave work early?”

“Yes.”

“Are you responsible for the death of Major Dieter Hellstrom?”

“Yes,” Erik answers, with as little hesitation as the rest.

“You make my job very easy, Erik,” Hans says, “thank you.” He opens his palm and offers the cufflink back toward Erik. “It was an impressive murder. It took three men and two bandsaws to untangle the Major’s corpse from the bars of the window. You should have just slit his throat, or shot him, perhaps.”

Erik says nothing.

“Ah, but that would not have been enough. What is it you people say? _Dayenu_ , yes?”

Evidently, Hans’ Hebrew pronunciation isn’t so terrible.

The cufflink is leaving something of an impression on Hans’ palm. It is painful, yes—painful enough that Hans pries his hand away, gasping, and leaves the cufflink hovering in place in the air. His palm is bleeding, the wet red of a perfect swastika. Wonderful. Magnificent, really!

“Did you come here looking for Doctor Schmidt?” Hans asks. “He’s not here, you know. You can’t possibly have allied yourself with the Apache and his Basterds because you wanted to end the war?—Yes, of course, I know about that,” Hans explains when the traitorous flash of surprise crosses over Erik’s pale blue eyes. “What, do you think I have only come to Paris to chase one little aberrant boy? I know them, Erik. I know every last one of them. Though I will admit, I did not recognize Lieutenant Hicox as one of you at first, until I picked up his scent yesterday.”

The mark on his palm is sweltering. Hans wrings it out.

“How does it go,” Hans muses as his blood splatters on the floorboards. He will have to wrap that up. Oh, yes—Erik’s jacket will do. “How does it go—ah, yes. _Fee, fie, foe, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman._ ”

Hans turns his back and wipes the blood on the wool of Erik’s jacket, and listens as the cufflink falls to the floor with a gentle _clink_.

“I do believe the question is ‘Am I alone?’, Erik.” Hans extends his hand again, now clean enough, and the raised impression of the swastika, though still an angry red, has ceased to bleed. “And the answer, as you can see, is no. Not any more.”

***

“Lock the doors,” he tells Erik, once they are out in the foyer. “It’s what you came here to do, isn’t it?”

The film snipes playfully, thrills the air with gunshots and chatter and the screams of actors. Hans watches Erik instead, as the boy shuts his eyes and raises his arms. Erik’s hands tense like startled spiders, and a scream builds at the corners of his mouth, but it never sounds—or if it sounds, it is dwarfed by the crunch and hiss of a dozen locks. The metal bars of all the theater doors melt and clash together. The chandelier falls, and its wires barely have time to smoke and hiss before its hundred candlesticks weld into place, barring every entrance and all exits save one.

Hans can no longer contain his glee. “Oh, Doctor Schmidt was _right_ about you, Erik! You’re exceptional—truly exceptional. And here I am, with only my meager talents. Had you not been born a Jew, well, who knows what wonders you might have done for the Reich?”

Hans is not expecting the medals on his chest to burn through his uniform like a dozen smoldering coals. They cut Hans’ chest deeper than the cufflink scar on his palm, and Hans cannot help crying out in pain, but he has the presence of mind and facility of skill enough to lash out at Erik instead, to take him by the forearm and call his blood to the surface. Erik screams, and all the metal in the room is fixed in place before Hans claps a hand over Erik’s mouth to silence him.

“Not here,” Hans commands. “Not here, not now. Take me to the Apache.”

He can feel Erik’s blood swelling, feel and smell and very nearly _see_ the bruise spreading over Erik’s flesh. Can it erase the number on his arm, for a time? Perhaps. Hans wonders if the boy would consider that a favor, or simply a weak literalization of the pain. He’ll save that question for later, he thinks.

Finger by finger, he pries his hand away from Erik’s mouth. Erik’s breath is warm, unsteady.

“Give me your sidearm,” Erik says. “Then I’ll take you to him.”

Hans laughs. “It’s not going to prevent me from hurting him.”

Erik takes the gun out of Landa’s holster anyway, lets it fly into his palm. “Don’t you want him to think so?”

“If the Apache doesn’t already know,” Landa says, “I’m sure he’ll think—oh, how does the idiom go?—ah, yes. That it is the best thing since sliced bread.”

***

The Basterds, evidently, have set up the perimeter to accommodate a swift escape for them and no compromise whatsoever for anyone else. Hans can smell them, in windows and parked trucks and the cafe across the street, so ordinary to the eyes of the mundane. But Hans, no, Hans is not the mundane, and the Basterds’ apprehensions and concerns and _fear_ reek as much as their blood. There, in the alley, is Donowitz, armed to the teeth and itching to set off his explosives. There is Utvitch the Little Man, still in the limousine, nearly pissing himself when he sees Landa’s smile. There are Wicki and Sitglitz, their odors as intermingled as they were in the trail that began at _La Louisiane_. Hirschberg is missing; in all likelihood, he is back at the theater, in one capacity or another, and will die with Hicox whether the bombs go off or not.

And there, ah, there is the Apache. Hans smells him moments before Erik raises his fist to signal Lieutenant Aldo Raine out of the back of a van. The Apache is almost exactly as Hans pictured him, from the filth on his fingers to the ragged pink smile on his neck. Hans has been waiting so long to touch the Apache that he almost forgets there is a gun trained on the small of his back along with an extremely powerful and angry young aberrant man who doesn’t even need his finger to pull the trigger.

“Lieutenant Aldo Raine, I presume,” Hans says, in English.

“Hans Landa,” the Apache says, and mispronounces it almost beyond recognition.

“He asked to be brought to you,” Erik says to the Apache. His English is not nearly as good as his French, but Hans has a much easier time understanding it than the Apache’s reply:

“Well, I guess I better thank you for assuming he meant alive.” The nearby Basterds laugh, and Hans wants to smile at every last one of them.

“I did,” Hans says. “After all, if I die, your plan goes to Hell just as swiftly as I do.”

“Really.”

“Real and truly, Lieutenant. Why, at this very moment, Lieutenant Hicox and Private Hirschberg are meeting with some resistance. But a whisper from one of my subordinates in the Führer’s ear and your precious Operation Kino does not succeed.”

“He’s lying,” Erik says. “He’s lying. I welded all the doors.”

Hans turns around enough to pat Erik on the shoulder and see if it makes him flinch. It does. Wonderful. “To be sure, it will take more than three men and two bandsaws to get this little Gordian knot undone. But Erik, I thought you _knew_ there was someone in the Nazi High Command with the ability to absorb the blast.”

Honestly, Hans is surprised that his statement doesn’t cause Erik to pull the trigger. On the other hand, Hans can distinctly feel a slow rippling charge through all his medals and buttons and the knife at his belt, and imagines the Basterds can feel the same.

“My point is,” Hans goes on, leaving Erik to his woes, “yes, your bombs will go off, and in all likelihood several Germans will die, and Goebbels will be very, very angry at you for what you’ve done to his big night. But because of my contingencies, you won’t get Hitler, and you won’t get Goering, and you won’t get Goebbels, and you won’t get Boorman. And you need all four to end the war.”

The knife is starting to cut through its sheath. Hans unclasps his belt, ignores the static shock as best he can, and holds the dagger in both hands.

“But if you, for instance, accept my terms—or put me in touch with your superior officers, who I am sure would be eager to entertain the prospect of speaking to me diplomatically—you can easily end the war tonight.”

It is odd, to Hans—odd and somewhat amusing—that the Basterds, even the Apache, deliberate this silently, and Erik, of all of them, says “No.”

Hans laughs. “No? No, not on these terms?” He turns to look Erik over, from his haunted pale eyes to his shaking fingers on the gun. “Isn’t it enough that the fighting will be done? Or are you a war profiteer now, Erik? Would you have these _atrocities_ continue just for the sake of justifying your thirst for vengeance? Why, if that’s the case, perhaps we were right all along to keep your people under lock and key—”

Hans has been shot before. Hans has been shot and strangled and beaten before. But never all at once, and never with the exhaust pipe of a van. If Hans didn’t have such an intimate knowledge of his own body and blood he would not be able to tell one wound from the next; the bullet has gone through his side, entrance and uglier exit in the front, and the metal door and exhaust of the Apache’s van are apparently dueling to see which can crush him first. Hans laughs, and concentrates enough to seal the wounds (though they will smart like the devil, no doubt, and cost him this uniform), and he counts on, and receives, the righteous confusion of the Basterds and their leader.

“Now you wait one goddamn second,” the Apache shouts, and the van door drops soundly onto Landa’s front and pins him to the concrete. “I said _cut that shit out!_ Now lift the fucking door off him.”

Evidently, Erik is not one of the ones who complies with that order, and Hans can see straight enough through this oxygen-deprived fog to make out four hands relieving him of this somewhat Sisyphean burden.

“You can’t listen to him,” Erik is railing—in, German, now, and Wicki is struggling to translate and lift the car door at the same time. “You can’t trust him, you should kill him right here, nothing can go wrong at the theater, I _sealed_ it—”

“Wicki, tell the kid to hold on, he’s forgotten his English.”

Hans is immeasurably pleased—brimming with glee, even—when the first thing he sees when the car door is lifted is the Apache proving himself to be a man of reason.

“Kid,” the Apache starts, with more than a bit of a sigh on his breath, “first of all, you gotta believe me, I would love nothing more than to let you and everyone else here go to town on this here Nazi like wolves on a roadkill deer. And ninety percent of the time, I’d give that order. Hell, I’ve _given_ that order. But ten percent of the time you’ve gotta re-evaluate that order and pass it off to the high command. And one of those times is when that deer ain’t as roadkill as he’s supposed to be.”

“What happened to _one thing and one thing only_?” Donowitz hollers, and rams his shoulder into the side of the van.

“Yeah,” Utvitch pipes in. “I thought we weren’t in the prisoner-taking business.”

“For fuck’s sake,” the Apache says, “ _look_ at him.”

The Basterds do.

And, hopefully, what they see is Hans brushing himself off after a gunshot wound, and a ring of iron bruises around his neck already tapering down to gold.

***

It is a somewhat bumpy drive. The van was irreparable, but the Basterds did not have any other means of locomotion, and so Hans is sandwiched between the Apache (driving) and Erik (with a gun, to his head, this time). By now, back in Paris, _Nation’s Pride_ should be reaching its frenzied climax, and Hicox should be sweating in his seat, and Doctor Schmidt should be waiting in the wings, all too ready to stifle the blast, save the Reich, and unearth a certain Jewish American terrorist conspiracy, at Landa’s slightest command.

“So you’re—what,” the Apache asks, without asking, in that peculiar American way. “You’re some kind of Superman.”

Hans is amused: Erik, rather palpably, is not. “My associates would be thrilled to hear you say so! Perhaps. But no, no, Lieutenant Raine, I won’t be giving you any more information on that particular facet of my being until we are across Allied lines.” He smiles, first at the Apache, and then at Erik, who had best keep his powers in check if he wants the Apache to live.

Hans wonders how much Erik cares.

Well, _we shall see._

The wind whistles through the back of the van, and the exhaust reeks almost of murder. Landa settles himself into the seat and admires the French countryside, and counts the minutes.

“You know, Lieutenant Raine,” Hans says, “I know your mission was top-secret, of course, but don’t you think your outfit would benefit from a two-way radio?”

“Landa,” the Apache snarls, “I am about this close” he takes one hand off the steering wheel and pinches his thumb and forefinger together “to snapping your neck and seeing if you come back like the Christ on Easter. And I imagine the kid’s a fraction of an inch closer. So if you’re not telling me what’s up with your Nazi blood, or screaming ‘cause I’m draining it out of you, I don’t wanna hear a peep.”

Hans laughs. “They tried that, you know, draining it out of me. That was one of the first things they tried. And they discovered, predictably, that my aberrant blood replenishes itself faster than that of a normal human. But no, Lieutenant Raine, I will not tell you _how_ fast, or who _they_ are—or were, I should say. Erik here has dispatched of several researchers already. Or didn’t you know that?”

The Apache drives. The Allied line nears. “I thought I said I didn’t wanna hear a peep out of you.”

“You did,” Hans agrees. “Such an exceptional memory you have.”

“My sixth-grade teacher said so too. Best speller in my class, she said. I won the county Bee, back in ’23.”

“Yes, in Maynardville, Tennessee.” Hans sighs. “What was the winning word?”

“Gesamtkunstwerk,” the Apache says, or something like it.

“Well, clearly it was not a pronunciation Bee.”

“Kid, give him a little nuzzle with that gun, he’s asking for it.”

Erik blinks. “What?”

“I said hit him.”

“Oh,” Erik says. He pistol-whips Hans in the temple.

The minutes tick away. Hans mends the bruise, and slouches closer to Erik. “Are you so angry because you can’t kill me,” he asks in German, just barely a whisper, hidden under the pounding wind, “or because this car is taking you farther and farther away from Doctor Schmidt?”

The gun shivers in Erik’s palm, and Hans can tell it is more than just his power. Erik’s sweat reeks on the air and gathers at his hairline. Hans reaches over and flattens it into Erik’s skin with his thumb, calls up Erik’s blood to put the flesh to sleep.

“Or is it because you have given this man so much, and you see what he will do to us?” Hans taps his fingertips on Erik’s forehead, leaves prints in the sweat. “Don’t you expect the Americans will do to me what the Doctor did to you? I think the Lieutenant here is living proof they will. He’s afraid of me, Erik. He’ll be afraid of you. And he’ll hate you as much as he hates me, that’s for certain. Doesn’t it disgust you that you lent your powers to a cause he can’t even follow through with? To a man who will probably turn you in just the same as me? I can guarantee you, Erik, the only difference between what they do and what Doctor Schmidt did to you will be that you won’t be able to understand their language half as well. They will talk about you like an ape. Like a specimen in a jar. Like an unthinking, un-human anomaly. And he’ll tell you just like he told me, he doesn’t want to hear a peep out of you. And he’ll tell someone as gullible as you to beat you with the butt of a gun, like you did to me.”

Erik says nothing. But his eyes and his scent speak volumes.

“You believe me,” Hans says. “Of course you do. You’re better than he thinks.”

The car skids, and grinds to a halt, and the wind stops whistling through the open back. Hans leans forward, and can just make out the Allied encampment, across a forested stretch of No Man’s Land. Ah, Hans remembers this from the first Great War, the war that ended nothing at all.

“Get out,” the Apache commands, and Hans is all too ready to obey. He stretches his legs, clasps his hand over the healing wound in his side. The blood has knit itself thick, almost as hard as chiton, but the scar is certainly worth his life. “How much time we got before the theater blows?”

“Five minutes,” Hans says. “And I assure you, that is more than enough time for me to foil your plans.”

“That so.” The Apache extends his hand to Erik, who passes him the gun.

The Apache shoots Hans point-blank in the knee.

The pain is blinding, and searing, and Hans falls flat to the dirt. Now, blood, Hans can knit, and flesh, if there isn’t much, but he has no control over bone and that knee is now shattered, so thoroughly broken that he might as well slice the rest of his leg off, here and now. And what’s worse, he knows it, and can feel his blood coating fragments of bone and cartilage and irreparable muscle, calling back to him.

“We—we had a _deal_!” he shouts, and he doesn’t know what language he’s speaking but it barely matters, “You’re throwing it away—you—you’re throwing the war away—”

“See, the way I’m looking at it, _you_ were the one threatening to throw it away,” the Apache says, which means, yes, Hans is shouting in English. “Us Basterds had nothing doing for the contrary.”

“But—but the blast—”

“Oh, never mind the blast, we’ve got Hirschberg.” The Apache smiles as wide and as bright as the scar across his neck. “And he’s like you. Don’t know how we lucked out with that, but I’ve never seen a better soldier with a knife, and I’m counting myself in that number. You know why that is, Hans? It’s ‘cause Hirschberg don’t need a knife, just his little finger. You couldn’t break that kid’s bones with a baseball bat. We’ve _tried._ And I think he made sure your contingency had better things to do with his time than sit around waiting for a bomb to go off.”

Oh.

Oh _god_. “He’ll survive,” Hans says, because everything else is leaving him.

“Maybe,” the Apache agrees. “And maybe Hirschberg will, if we’re lucky. But your Kaiser’s toast no matter how you slice it.”

In the distance, the Allied encampment buzzes and stirs. So many phones ring at once that Hans can feel them rocking the earth.

Over Hans’ head, the Apache extends the gun back to Erik. “You wanna do the honors, kid?”

Erik tenses his fingers. The gun rises out of the Apache’s palm, then sinks down into Hans’ mouth.

No one has to pull the trigger.

***

***

Aldo Raine leans back onto the hood of the van and smokes what might well be the best cigarette of his life. Erik kneels in the grass, a fist curled in Landa’s blood-soaked hair, as Aldo’s machete saws back and forth over what remains of Landa’s scalp. There’s still enough to keep, so Aldo thinks it counts.

“Lyncher,” he says, and the kid looks up and wipes his hands on Landa’s coat. “Can I call you Lyncher?”

Erik nods.

Aldo offers him the cigarette. “Well then, Lyncher, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Erik accepts the cigarette, and the knife keeps sawing, back and forth.

***


End file.
